Meeting of the Parliament 17 January 2024
This issue is perhaps the one that I hear most about from constituents across South Scotland, and that is why it is essential that it is given fair hearing here today. Whether people live in rural or urban areas, are young or old, have a long-term condition or are seeking new advice, worries about NHS waiting times are a constant. It is described to me as not just waiting but languishing on NHS waiting lists. That is not my description but that of patients and constituents in all our communities. I expect that every one of us here has or knows someone who is waiting and experiencing that.
Put simply, our constituents want to know what can be done to stop our NHS being put under such constant pressure. Although they are sympathetic to the fact that waiting times are a reality of any health service, some of the extended waits that people are having to put up with are simply unheard of. There are 7,000 Scots waiting for more than two years. I was not going to bring this up, but in the cabinet secretary’s contribution he kept referring to other nations. In Scotland there are 7,000 people waiting for more than two years, and in England there are 227. It is not helpful to continue to go over those figures. People want to know what is happening.
In Scotland, it is at the point where it has become commonly accepted that there are certain operations and treatments that people might have to wait years for. In some cases, that wait can shorten lives and cause unmanageable stress.
Is that really what we came to this place to do? As lawmakers and elected representatives of our communities, we have to understand that the people who are telling us this are not just statistics moving from one column to another; they are real people with complex lives who are in constant limbo because they simply do not know when they will receive the treatment that they require.
As we have heard, under the SNP Government, 80,000 people and their loved ones are living with anxiety and, in many cases, pain for more than a year while waiting for planned care, because the Government is not getting it right. Those people view commitments that the Government has made as a personal promise, and time and again, they are seeing that those commitments amount to just words. That is not acceptable, and I implore those who have the power to change the trajectory not to say, “Look over there—it’s someone else’s fault,” or, “We’re not as bad as someone else.” That does not do justice to our constituents.
The Government should look at the NHS’s long-term investment and infrastructure needs in Scotland, be honest about delays on national treatment centres and reset the programme clearly. The cabinet secretary mentioned only a couple of the national treatment centres and did not speak about some of the other projected centres. We need to ensure that our workforce is secure and that we move away from the damaging and expensive reliance on agency workforce. That has been a thing under the SNP Government, and it needs to address the issue. Our job is to hold the Government to account, and I ask it to address that.
I have sympathy for any Government that has to put up with the constant undercutting of public services that is led by the Conservative Government in Westminster, but our job in this place is to deal with what we can do, and the Scottish Government can do things. Therefore, on behalf of my constituents, I say: let us be clear about what can be done. The Government has been in power for 17 years and should deliver its promises on staffing and national treatment centres. The staffing crisis is making commitments such as the one on the national treatment centres impossible to deliver.
We must do what we can. I make a genuine request to the cabinet secretary to feed back appropriately on the issue, so that we can feed that back to our communities and our constituents. Cabinet secretary, let us push forward into the new year with a serious plan and not even more empty promises.
16:27